Millions of viewers have now become hooked on The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, but there’s one person out there who has yet to watch the show on the Trial of the Century: prosecutor Marcia Clark. In our interview with her from last month, a week before the series premiered, Clark explained she was reluctant to relive such a painful time in her life. “When I first heard they were going to do this, I kept praying that somehow, something would go wrong,” she said. “It’s not entertainment for me. It’s a tragedy.”

Over the course of the 11-month trial, Clark was eviscerated in the press. Her appearance, particularly her much maligned perm and preference for pantsuits, was torn apart. Her personal problems, including the ongoing custody case for her two kids, became another news story. Then the National Enquirer published a series of old topless photos of Clark while on vacation. Add to all of that, Clark was ultimately blamed for the inevitable not guilty verdict.

While American Crime Story has reimagined all of those excruciating moments, the series ultimately corrects the unjust portrayal of Clark as an incompetent, aggressive attorney who lost the case of the century. The show examines the trial’s racial aspects, but it also dives deep into the sexist obstacles that Clark was forced to face. Time has certainly helped provide a new perspective on the case, but much of Clark’s vindication was brought about by Sarah Paulson’s layered portrayal of the prosecutor in American Crime Story. Vogue.com spoke to Paulson by phone about taking on such a complex role, sexism during the ’90s, and how Clark might have been treated entirely different had the O.J. Simpson case taken place today.

Do you remember watching the O.J. Simpson trial back then?Well, I was a kid, kind of, I was 19. I consider that being a kid when I look back at it now. I didn’t watch the trial on a daily basis the way some people I knew did. I remember watching the Bronco chase and being quite irritated by it because it was interrupting whatever program I was watching at the time, which was probably Thirtysomething. I was not obsessed with watching the trial. I remember the verdict, I remember the Bronco, the glove; I remember all the highlights.

Why do you think you weren’t enraptured like the rest of the country?I think you can chalk up that kind of thing to youth. I was beginning my career as an actress. I was understudying Amy Ryan on Broadway. I was in the throes of my budding life, and I think what was lost on me—not by my own doing, I think it was lost in the circus of the trial itself—was that two people had been brutally murdered. And that O.J. Simpson, who I only knew of from the Naked Gun movies because I wasn’t a football person, I just remember thinking how strange it was that he was in that car fleeing. I remember it seemed like something only a guilty person would do.

How did they approach you about playing Marcia Clark?Ryan Murphy just told me I was doing it. He actually said to me: “Do you want to do this? I’m going to send you these two scripts, but I won’t send them if you don’t even want to do it.” And I said to him, “Ryan, there’s no universe in which I’m not going to want to play that part.”

What attracted you about playing this role?It was very thrilling for me because obviously the part is incredibly rich and complicated and it’s not just playing someone’s wife or girlfriend. She’s a three-dimensional person, as opposed to these cardboard-cutout wife characters that we are supposed to consider ourselves lucky to be playing. I knew it was a big opportunity for me to really have something to chew on.

Were you ever hesitant about playing a character based on a real person?I was scared; it was very scary. The hesitation was more about my own ego and my own capacity to pull it off. Everybody knows Marcia Clark. There’s an iconic quality to our thoughts about Marcia Clark. The minute you think about her, you can conjure up an image and that’s an iconic image. That hair, that turtleneck, that mole! From an acting perspective, I thought, How am I going to do this? Can I do this? It’s one thing to create a character out of whole cloth from the writer’s imagination and your imagination, it’s another thing to be playing a person that many people have in their consciousness. After that, what became a much larger concern of mine was the responsibility of getting it right for Marcia.

What did you think about Marcia Clark before signing on to the show?She was portrayed as a sort of cardboard cutout of a bitchy, aggressive, ambitious woman. Very intense, fiery, strong, too smart for her own good—whatever that means. And I definitely think that I drank the Kool-Aid. I remember holding that opinion of her based on absolutely nothing but cursory things that I would pick up on the news, because as I said, I wasn’t absorbing it in a way some people were. I think a lot of women are guilty of doing that at that time. For some reason, I feel women collectively abandoned Marcia. And they didn’t want to be associated with that type of womanhood.

The show really explores the sexism that Marcia had to endure throughout the trial. Do you think it’s an accurate portrayal?Any of those words that I used to describe her before, if I used them to describe a man they would be considered attributes. You call a man intense, fiery, ambitious, too smart, and you go, “Oooh, I want that guy to represent me.” But these very same words used to describe a woman become really negative. I was guilty of believing them myself and I am a woman. There’s something that happened in the zeitgeist where women were not embracing her. And I think it’s because we have our own ideas of what we think womanhood looks like and what we want that to be. I look at myself and I give myself a tiny bit of a break because I was a kid. But I don’t know why no one was coming up and rallying behind her. Who cares if she’s wearing concealer? She’s trying to put a man she believes to be guilty in jail. Why is any of what she’s wearing or her hair or makeup choices, why does any of that have anything to do with her capabilities? Why is this even a conversation?

Do you think the press would have treated her the same way today as they did in the ’90s?I think it probably would’ve been the same. But I think given the rules of today’s society of social media, there would’ve been a place or a group—you know, the Internet is a giant megaphone and that didn’t exist then—so someone, somewhere would have started a Twitter feed or some kind of hashtag or a Facebook page for “We Love Marcia.” On that level there could’ve been some kind of rallying cry that would’ve had a place to live.

How did you prepare for the role? Did you meet Marcia first?I didn’t meet Marcia until we were almost done. I was encouraged by our producers and writers to not do that while we were shooting because we are telling Jeffrey Toobin’s story, [the show] is based on his book [The Run of His Life]. Also, given my deep respect and growing love for her, the more I read, I thought: If I meet her and she’s not who I think she is, I’m not going to be able to play it the way I want to play it. And then I thought, What if she’s everything and more and then I just want to do everything?

Did you read any of the many, many books on the trial?I read her book, I read Christopher Darden’s book, I read the Toobin book. I watched every interview before and after the trial. I watched speeches she made after the trial. I watched opening and closing arguments. I watched footage every single day of her in that courtroom. Every day I was in the courtroom and I had to do anything courtroom-related, there was always a lot of footage for me to watch. An absolute plethora, a cornucopia of footage on the Internet!

There’s a scene that shows her holding back tears in court. Did that really happen?I definitely know that at some point there were tears when they weren’t supposed to come, where she didn’t intend to cry.

A lot of people are saying this show is the vindication of Marcia Clark. Do you agree?To me, the “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” episode [the show’s sixth episode that focuses on the prosecutor], that felt like a person in a boxing match whose hands had been tied behind her back and she was taking a pummeling from every single angle—from her home angle, her work angle. I thought it was very harrowing. I really don’t know how she did this. I just thought, How in the world did she wake up in the morning, put both feet on the ground, feed her children, deal with her ex-husband, prepare all of her briefs, get ready for the day, be in a courtroom where the world is watching, and keep her wits about her—much less her emotions in check, much less her brain operating in a tireless capacity.

It’s asking a lot, I think. She was just one person. I don’t know how she did it, I marvel at it. Every time I had to go to work because I was really tired because I was doing American Horror Story and American Crime Story at the same time so I wasn’t getting any sleep, I would just think, You know what? Just go with it because I know Marcia Clark wasn’t getting any sleep, either.

How was it when you finally met Marcia Clark? What did you talk about?“I just want to apologize for the hair,” that’s what she said first to me. And she said, “Oh, and the blazers, too.” It was surreal to meet someone that you felt you had known for forever. And it was only because I had been living with her book and looking at her face 80 hours a day. If you could see our makeup trailer! In there, there were photos plastered from ceiling to floor with images of everybody, so you were just inundated with images of Marcia Clark. I just felt like I was living and breathing her. So when she walked into that restaurant, I squealed like a baby pig. We had a wonderful night, we closed the restaurant down, and we talked for hours. It was an incredible thing. Sometimes it’s very scary to meet people you admire and sometimes it’s a great gift.

Did she mention whether or not she’s going to watch the show?At the time, she felt very conflicted whether or not she would be able to. It’s obviously an incredibly painful thing to revisit. I think it’s hard for people to imagine and behold that for her to sit back and watch a television show that basically highlights a most painful time for her would be a lot to ask. That being said, I hope she does because I know there was so much care given and so much sensitivity in trying to get the emotional truth correct and to give her the respect she always deserved.

I definitely think she’s been given a second chance with this show.I do, too. It could be a really wonderful thing to have another look at who Marcia Clark is and was. And what it means for us as women to investigate internally why we didn’t have her back. Now, when we reveal all the things that are revealed in this show about what she was contending with while this was happening, I hope that the respect she deserved then is the respect she gets to enjoy now.